I'd love my insurance to be deducted from my taxes.......?

Evidently Draugnar hasn't read HR3.

Apparently it does not concern him that women are being penalized for having an insurance plan that covers abortion, even if those services aren't used. It does not concern him that the government is directly meddling with private contracts between private insurers and women, in order to make abortion as difficult to obtain as possible. It affects 87% of private insurance plans. Apparently all of those people are living privileged lives, or so the rightwing misogynists would have us believe. The law even applies to abortions done in cases of medical necessity. Simply put, insurers aren't going to want to provide abortion coverage if they are being given tax penalties for doing so. The aim of the bill is to force private insurers to stop covering abortion services.

Women will have fewer job opportunities available to them if they need to work for a business that provides coverage for abortion services in their company’s health insurance policy.

Women who work for companies that do not offer insurance coverage that includes abortion services will be forced to purchase a more expensive private health insurance plan if they need abortion services covered by their health insurance.

Women who cannot/will not change their place of business will have to give up abortion coverage if their company is forced to switch to a health insurance plan that does not include abortion to obtain tax credits.

I read it and, as I said, I don't think it will pass as written. I believe it, like all bills, will undergo serious modification to the point of recognizing medical or moral necessity (rape and incest being the moral necessity) as well as being reduced to only apply to FSAs.

Putin, you are a PoliSci prof. Surely you recognize that nearly every bill goes through a variety of iterations before settling into something of a theoretically acceptable form or it doesn't get passed. There are exceptions of course, and I hope this isn't one of them, but that is the point of our political system: compromise.

And, honestly, even if it passed as is, the President would veto it and it could never get the 2/3rds majority it needs to override the veto.

The whole point was the religious fanatics in this country are trying to take away everyone else's rights. So if the courts rule they can't pray in a public school, I say tough cookies.

But religious freedoms don't just apply to fanatics any more than protection from religious oppresion (by the religious fanatics) applies to just athiests. The freedoms and protections from oppression apply to *all* people.

Only fanatics would want to pray in school. Again, this is not depriving anybody of rights. Children do not have constitutional rights anyway (that little matter of "in loco parentis" - try having a high school athlete invoke the 4th amendment in order to block a urine test for sports, or locker searches), but even if they did, schools aren't churches.

What about the salah, which states that Muslims should pray (among other times) just after noon? Most Islamic kids would be in school then, right?

and they are allowed to, people are allowed to pray in public schools, it just cannot be led by faculty or given tacit endorsement by faculty

ie. dropping to a knee and having a coach, paid by the school,, lead the team in prayer

So a group of Muslim children decide they want to pray together and you are going to ban it because, by "organizing" (gasp) they are somehow getting tacit approval?

And I agree having the coach lead a prayer is wrong. But disallowing a group of students to gather of their own accord, without some faculty member organizing it, to pray is not giving tacit approval nor is it in someone forcing it upon someone else who doesn't want to do it.

"So a group of Muslim children decide they want to pray together and you are going to ban it because, by "organizing" (gasp) they are somehow getting tacit approval?"

No, in fact this was done in a private room in my school when i was in high school, it was available for afternoon prayers.

and i didnt say tacit approval, i said tacit endorsement, there is a difference.

Yes, there is. My apologies. So do you agree it should be acceptable for a self-organized group of students to get together and pray or have a Bible study?

as long as the school doesnt provide, funding, I had a christian club in my school, I don't believe the supreme court has come down against such things, someone correct me if im wrong

what is with me and commas on this site

Well, Putin would have your club banned. That is what I'm objecting to. He thinks we should abridge the rights of everyone because a few have attempted to exceed their rights.

Right, Putin's statement was why I brought up the salah, too.

"What about the salah, which states that Muslims should pray (among other times) just after noon? Most Islamic kids would be in school then, right?"

I don't think public schools should give special treatment to Muslims. If you can't accept the fact that public schools aren't churches or mosques, then go to a private school.

A church or mosque instructs people in prayer. Most public facilities allow people to pray. There's a huge difference, and that's the difference we're discussing. We all agree that instructed in prayer is wrong in schools, but allowed to pray should be, well, allowed. The same as it would be in, say, a public park.

A friend of mine was forced to take off a t-shirt that said "Free the Cuban 5" before entering a court room. I had to literally give him the shirt off my back so he could get in. Public facilities aren't free-for-all zones.

The question isn't some much whether they are so much as whether they should be.

I mean how much disruption are schools forced to accept to accommodate prayer? Do teachers have to put their lessons on hold while the Muslim population departs for their group prayer in the middle of the day? It's totally unreasonable. The purpose of a school is to educate.

they dont put their lessons on hold, and in my experience, Muslim students usually schedule their lunch hour around it.

They shouldn't be. Rights were never meant to be absolute, context-free, and unassailable in all circumstances. And certainly most of us on the (communist) left have never had the "privilege" of having our rights protected by the American government, so we have trouble 'sympathizing' with bourgeois whining about the 'constitutional right' to disrupt the classroom in order to observe medieval customs.

I don't know about your high school years, but we didn't have the scheduling flexibility to demand the same lunch hour every semester. It was contingent on what our course work was. So this idea that Muslims all get the same lunch hour in a school of any significant size is again, absurd.

I like how, in many circumstances these days, conversations about rights come down to "Well, I didn't get (x) so no one should get (x)." That's ridiculous, and flies in the face of any form of progress. You always should want the next generation to be better off than your generation.